What is SEO Content? 12 Best Practices to Get It Right

One important element of on-page SEO is content SEO. In short, content SEO is about creating and optimizing your content so that can it potentially rank high in search engines and attract search engine traffic.

In this post you will learn what is content SEO and how to optimize your content for search engines and users using best practices.

A set of LSI related keywords related to your main keyword (more on this below)

You will use these as part of the content SEO process. To be more specific:

Your target keyword should be included in your URL, page title and h1 heading.

Long tail keywords can be included in your subheadings

Other related keywords (LSI) can be included in your subheadings and body of the content.

2. Use keywords in the title, heading and body of your content

Use your main keyword above the fold

Everybody knows that your main keyword should appear in your title and h1 heading but what is equally important is to mention your keyword once or twice in the first couple of paragraphs.

There is a rule of thumb stating that the important content of a page is the one found on the top part of the page (above the fold), so make sure that within that content you give search engine spiders more clues on what the rest of your content is all about.

Here is an example from one of my posts. The target keyword was meta description.

Example showing the use of keywords above the fold

Use long tail related keywords for subheadings

When you are targeting a specific keyword, you don’t just repeat that over and over again but you use variations of that keyword in your content.

A great way to do this is to find out long tail keywords that are related to your main keyword and use those in your sub-headings.

Start typing your main keyword in the Google search box and take note of the different suggestions. These are great keywords to including your subheadings and content.

Google keywords suggest tool

Another way to find out related keywords is to search for main keyword in Google and look for the ‘People Also Ask’ section.

Example of Google’s ‘People Also Ask’

Use LSI keywords in your content

LSI stands for Latent Semantic Index and in simple terms these are word phrases that have the same meaning as your main keyword.

Why are LSI keywords important? With the introduction of Rank Brain (Google’s machine learning technology used as part of the ranking algorithm), Google is trying to understand the broader meaning of keywords and this is taken into account in rankings.

How do you find LSI keywords?

The easier way is to search for your main keyword in Google and take a look at the “related searches” section.

Google Related Keywords

Another way is to use a tool like LSI Graph to get suggestions for LSI keywords to include in your content.

LSI Keywords

3. Always use text to accompany your non-text content

Search engines can understand text content more than any other type of content so make their life easier by having text content on your page, even if you are promoting other types of content.

For example, let’s say you created a nice infographic about a topic and you want to publish it on your blog. Don’t just add the infographic and hit publish but try to have text content on the page explaining what the infographic is all about.

You can follow the same concept when publishing images, videos or audio. For example, if you are running a podcast you can have the description of the podcast and even a text transcript so that both users and search engines can get a better understanding on what the audio is all about.

4. Satisfy the user intent and make it clear from the beginning

Before publishing any type of content on your website you need to understand the user intent. In other words, what type of content users want to see for a given search query.

The easiest way to do this is to take advantage of Google because they (Google) have already done a great job in understanding what users like for different searches.

Here are the steps to follow:

Let’s say that you are writing an article about ‘what is off-page SEO’. The first step is to search google for this term and look for the featured snippet and the meta descriptions of the first 10 results.

Google Featured Snippet

If you take a closer look at the above screenshot, you will notice that Google is trying to give a direct answer to the question “What is off-page SEO” in both the featured snippet and in the description of each snippet.

This pattern tells us that if you want to rank high for this term, you need to give a direct answer to that question.

In other words, the intent of the user for the particular query is to read a definition of what we mean by ‘off page SEO’.

If you take a look at my post, which is ranking in the featured snippet and in the top positions, I’m giving an answer to the question in the first paragraph.

What you should learn from this?

For search queries that are related to questions, how-tos or lists, try to give the answer on the top part of your page and then you can give more details within the post and not the other way around.

In the past, we used to write long introductions and lay out a lot of content so that readers can spend more time reading it before getting to an answer but this is no longer the case.

Give the answer first, satisfy the initial user intent and then expand your article to give more information.

5. Write long form content

There are a number of studies showing that long form content performs better in search and social media networks.

Study: Content Length and Rankings

While this is true, it does not mean that you should write thousands of words for the sake of getting to a word limit.

Quality of the content is always more important than quantity. If what you write is good and attracts shares and links, it can rank high in Google even if there are other posts that are longer in length.

I prefer to publish long form content because it makes sense for SEO articles. This is what readers want and this is what my competitors are doing.

Optimize long form content

A nice tip for optimizing long form articles is to use a table of contents at the top of the post to help users navigate through the content.

Besides making navigation easier you also increase your chances of getting sitelinks to appear with your snippet in the Google search results.

For example, my SEO tutorial post is 5000 words long because it covers all aspects of SEO. To help users navigate through the content, I have included a table of contents.

Example of on-page table of contents

6. Add internal links to other related content on your website

Another element of content SEO is internal linking. Within your content, link to other pages of your website to help users find out more about a certain topic and search crawlers one more reason to index more pages from your website.

Internal links create what is called ‘content relevancy’ something that helps Google understand the meaning of the content better.

When adding internal links use meaningful anchor text so that crawlers can get a good idea on what the linked page is all about.

7. Add external links to other high-quality websites

Besides linking to your own articles, it’s a good practice to link out to other high-quality websites or sources provided that:

They will help users read more about a topic

You trust the website you will link to

You do it with getting a compensation (that’s selling links and it’s not allowed)

Don’t overdo it with external links but don’t be afraid to link out when it makes sense.

8. Make it easy to read

Make your content easy to read. Don’t just throw text on a page but apply formatting styles to make reading easier, especially for users who like to skim-read.

Use short paragraphs

Use bold and italics to highlight parts of the content that matter

Use lists to outline steps

Use short sentences

Use a font that is easy to read (and large enough) on all devices

Add enough white spacing between your paragraphs

9. Optimize non-text elements

As I have mentioned above, content can have many forms and is not necessarily text. When adding other non-text elements in your content, make sure that is optimized. The most common is images and all images included in your content should:

Have a friendly filename (i.e. lsi-keywords.jpg and not 345afg.jpg)

Have an appropriate ALT Text

Include a line text below the image to describe what the image is all about.

Here is an example:

Image SEO Guidelines

10. Use schema markup to describe your content to search engines

In addition to the above, you can make use of structured data to describe your content to search engines in a way they can understand.

There are a number of schemas you can implement depending on the type of content you are publishing. There are schemas for articles, videos, podcasts, products, recipes, reviews and more.

Structured data is gaining more importance the last couple of months and according to Google, it’s here to stay for the long term.

11. Group related pages together into categories

While this is not directly related to content SEO it is good for your overall SEO.

Google when crawling a page is primarily interested about the content found on that page but it also takes into account where the page belongs.

In other words, you should create categories and group your pages together making sure that your site structure is reflected in your menu and breadcrumbs.

Conclusion

Content SEO is a very important component of the on-page SEO process. Your overall goal is to give both users and search engines the content they are looking for. As stated by Google, know what your readers want and give it to them.

The process starts by finding out what users are looking for and creating content that satisfies their intent.

Before hitting the publish button, you should make sure that your main keywords are included in the top part of the page and related keywords (including LSI) in your subheadings and body.

Beautify your content, make it easy to read and navigate and then promote it to get in front of the eyes of as many people as possible.

Don’t worry if some of the above concepts are difficult to understand now, as you get more experienced with SEO, everything will make better sense.